What evidence did mainstream news outlets use to identify Alex Pretti’s employer and years of service?

1. Coworkers, chaplains and colleagues as primary on-the-record sources

Several mainstream stories quoted colleagues, union officials and a chaplain who worked with Pretti to establish his employer and tenure: colleagues described him as a "dedicated" ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA, and the Washington State Nurses Association and the AFGE local noted his employment with the Veterans Health Administration ^{[2] [3]}. A priest who said he worked alongside Pretti at the Minneapolis VA provided a longer personal timeline — saying he had known Pretti for about ten years at the VA — a claim published by local outlets that creates an internal discrepancy in tenure estimates ^[6].

2. Professional credentials and licensing cited to anchor a timeline

Reporters used Pretti’s nursing licensing and educational record as corroboration for when he entered clinical nursing: multiple outlets reported that he obtained his nursing license in January 2021 after attending the University of Minnesota and working briefly as a research assistant, a date used to anchor the beginning of his VA clinical career ^{[1] [7]}. That licensing date underpins mainstream accounts that place his VA ICU work as beginning in or shortly after 2021 ^[1].

3. Union and organizational statements reinforced the VA affiliation

Labor and professional groups offered explicit confirmations of employer and role: the American Federation of Government Employees local and nursing associations publicly identified Pretti as a VA ICU nurse and invoked his union membership in statements about the shooting, which mainstream outlets cited to verify his workplace connection ^{[3] [8]}. These third‑party institutional confirmations carried weight for news organizations unwilling to rely solely on social posts or unverified web reports.

4. Fact‑checks and verification pushed back on alternative claims

Mainstream outlets pointed to and relied on independent fact‑checking to rebut a widely circulated fabricated report claiming Pretti had been fired from “Lakeshore Medical Center” after misconduct. BBC Verify, Hindustan Times, Times Now, IBTimes and others traced that narrative to Buzzreport247, found no evidence of a Dr. Elena Vasquez or employment at that hospital, and therefore treated the Buzzreport247 story as unreliable, strengthening the VA narrative by contrast ^{[4] [2] [5] [7]}. The consistent debunking of the fake site was central to why mainstream outlets reported VA employment rather than the fabricated Lakeshore claim ^{[4] [2]}.

5. Discrepancies, limits of publicly available documentation, and how outlets handled them

There is not a direct citation in the supplied reporting to an official VA personnel record released publicly; instead, mainstream outlets combined licensing information, colleague and union statements, and debunking of false alternatives to arrive at employer and years-of-service claims ^{[1] [3] [4]}. That reliance produced minor inconsistencies in reported length of service — some accounts say “about five years” at the Minneapolis VA (consistent with a 2021 license), while at least one local source relayed a chaplain’s description of a ten‑year association — and outlets noted those differences rather than claiming documentary personnel proof in the provided coverage ^{[2] [6]}.

Assessment: mainstream news outlets identified Pretti’s employer and approximate years of service by triangulating public professional milestones (nursing license and education), contemporaneous eyewitness and coworker testimony, union and association statements, and by discrediting a competing fabricated narrative that tried to assign him to a different hospital; the reporting did not, in the cited sources, include release of formal VA HR records but relied on multiple corroborating voices and fact checks to support the VA-employment account ^{[1] [3] [4] [2]}.